May, 4, 2024 archives

Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick is a Hollywood memoir from one of the creators of thirtysomething and director of films including Glory, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamond. It’s full of good stories well told, as you might expect, and also liberally sprinkled with writing and directing advice in the form of humorous lists, like “Ten Tips from Long Lunches with Sydney (Lumet).”

More than anything, it left me wanting to watch and re-watch some his films and those of the people he talks about a lot in the book like Denzel Washington. We did watch Glory before I started this and reading Zwick’s behind-the-scenes take on it really helped crystallize for me what I had liked about the film and how those performances came to be. We have The Last Samurai queued up to watch soon.

I also enjoyed how Russell Crowe kept popping up in strange and unexpected ways, which is funnier now that I look at their respective filmographies and see that they haven’t ever actually worked together. That doesn’t seem entirely accidental on Zwick’s part.

I double-checked whether they had worked together using The Oracle of Bacon and I love that it is still around. The list of the “centers of the Hollywood universe” (defined here) is incredible.